Trends in Sustainability – new online tool
The School of Earth & Environment at the University of Leeds, Queen’s University Management School Belfast, Euromed Management School Marseille and Berlin-based Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment (IZT) have launched a new online tool that tracks coverage of issues in sustainability across the world.
The Trends in Sustainability project tracks coverage of issues such as climate change, poverty and human rights in 115 leading broadsheets newspapers from 41 countries over a 20-year period from 1990 until 2010. To date the research has looked at approximately 69,000,000 articles in 410,000 newspaper issues. The results can be found on the new website Trendsinsustainability.com.
The research shows that while attention to sustainability-related issues has increased overall during the last 20 years, the media agenda in this area has changed considerably. In general, coverage of environmental problems like acid rain and the ozone hole, which have been successfully addressed, has diminished since the early 1990s.
On the other hand, articles on climate change have increased more than 10-fold since this time, amounting to an average of more than two articles per newspaper issue across the overall sample of 115 newspapers. The analysis of levels of broadsheet newspaper coverage on sustainability-related issues sheds light on levels of public attention to specific issues.
As the tool shows climate change has emerged as a defining issue in the context of sustainability in recent years. Climate change successfully gained general public acceptance of and attention to sustainability. At the same time it may have significantly changed the sustainability agenda itself – possibly at the expense of attention to socioeconomic problems such as malaria and HIV/AIDS or even corruption, human rights or poverty. All of these issues have seen a stark decline in media coverage in recent years, in particular since early 2006 when media attention devoted to climate change started to pick up markedly.
Looking at generic differences between the agendas that are reflected by newspaper coverage in developing and developed countries shows that there are distinct ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ sustainability agendas, with the latter tending to revolve around issues commonly associated with socioeconomic development rather than climate change.
The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant number 01UT1005, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra).
For more information please contact Dr Ralf Barkemeyer, Tel: +44-113-343 7485, email: r.barkemeyer(at)leeds.ac.uk.